The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group IT - The Emperor's New Buzzword Major Keary majkeary@netspace.com.au

A Little Polymic

Remember the children's story, The Emperor's New Clothes? It might be very old, but the message is still valid.

Do the people who constantly spout "IT" (with or without the full stops) know what it means beyond being an abbreviation for information technology? That particular IT is not to be confused with Information Theory, defined by ISO and which can be briefly described as the study of encoding and transmitting information. Information Theory is the foundation of data compression. 

Information Technology, on the other hand, is an amorphous term that means whatever the Humpty Dumpty's of the media, government, universities, and business choose - Humpty Dumpty was Lewis Carrol's character who said, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less". 

In 1997 a newspaper's unremarkable computer supplement was transmogrified to I.T., Information Technology for Professionals who - according to the first issue under the new masthead - apparently got "their live sports fix from a desktop computer". Another item told them to worry about sexual discrimination in the office, which one might have considered to be a human-resources management problem rather than anything to do with technology. 

Jonar Nader (Prentice Hall's Dictionary of Computing) defines IT as "A general term used to refer to all aspects of technology that encompass the creation, storage, display, exchange, and management of information for business, artistic, scientific, recreational, or personal use". That is about as general as one can get, a bandwagon with room for all.

If one cares to search Hansard there is a record of a Government minister citing the Nintendo Play Station as an example of information technology.

There is an Information Technology Association of America that lives at 1616 N. Fort Myer Dr., Arlington, VA 22209, USA. Formerly known as the Association of Data Processing Service Organizations, it "defines performance standards, improves management methods and monitors government regulations in the computer services field" [Freedman: Computer Desktop Encyclopedia]. 

From Where Did IT Come? 

The term, information technology, was coined by Harold Leavitt and Thomas Whisler in an article, Management in the 1980s, published in Harvard Business Review (XXXVI 41/1 November-December 1958). It is well worth reading for the accurate prediction of what was to happen to middle management; usually writers who engage in futurology are good for a giggle when revisited some four decades later, but in this instance the authors were remarkably accurate. They used information technology in the abstract rather than as a concrete term:

"Over the last decade a new technology has begun to take hold in American business, one so new that its significance is still difficult to evaluate. While many aspects of this technology are uncertain, it seems clear that it will ... [have a] ... far-reaching impact on managerial organization....

"The new technology does not yet have a single established name. We shall call it information technology. It is composed of several related parts. One includes techniques for processing large amounts of information rapidly, and it is epitomized by the high-speed computer. 
A second part centers around the application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making problems; it is represented by techniques like mathematical programming, and by methodologies like operations research. A third part is in the offing, though its applications have not yet emerged very clearly; it consists of the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs."

Jacques Attali was Professor of Economics at the Paris cole Polytechnique, for ten years was a principal advisor to President Mitterand, and later became president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In the 1970s he wrote a book about likely developments in the 21st century and refers to "the astonishing new information technologies" in the context of communications - especially the transmission of "drawings, designs, and images vital for industrial production". 

In 1984 the National Westminster Bank Quarterly Review of August 13 said: "The development of cable television was made possible by the convergence of telecommunications and computing technology (. generally known in Britain as information technology)". [OED]

Even though ISO uses the term it does not offer a definition, which is interesting when one considers ISO's passion for defining things; leave a couple of words unattended for five minutes in an ISO office and you'll find that someone has defined them as a term. ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) has used information technology since about 1990 in the description of character encoding standards. For example, ISO/IEC 9281-1:1990 (JTC1) is catalogued as:

Information technology-Picture coding methods-Part 1 
but ISO/IEC 8859-9:1989 (JTC1) is catalogued as:
Information processing - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets-Part 9: Latin alphabet No.5

The use of information technology in ISO/IEC documentation seems to have coincided with a decision to resolve the problem of conflicting character encoding standards issued by two technical committees ( TC97 and TC46) that later merged to become JTC1.

Why Define IT?

When law firms, accounting practices, universities, and government instrumentalities hold themselves out as having expertise, authority, or some other special qualification in respect of something, then they should be able to present a clear definition.

At present the term, information technology - and its ubiquitous abbreviation, IT - is so amorphous as to be meaningless. It might as well stand for idiots talking. A representative of one "IT" law firm, on admitting an absence of any definition, was asked, "why do you use it?". The response was, "Because it's catchy". 

No other profession or industry describes itself as this or that technology. For example, the automotive industry draws on the product and work of an enormous range of occupations and disciplines: from rubber tappers to chemical engineers. Decisions about what roads will be built to what standards are made by people who may not even have a driver's licence, let alone professional qualifications in any of the sciences associated with civil engineering. Decisions about the purchase of car and truck fleets are more likely to be made by accountants than mechanical engineers. 

Information technology has been a useful abstract term to describe a perceived development. What we now see is its application in a concrete sense, but without the benefit of definitional reinforcement. 

The word, information, appeared in Middle English under various spellings. Chaucer used it in his Tale of Melibeus (1386): "Whanne Melibee hadde herd the grette skiles and resons of Dame Prudence, and hire wise informacions ...". It means no more than a fact or circumstance of which one is told. As we all know, when some-one, or some corporate body, provides information it is not necessarily true. 

Since its introduction the word has found a legal meaning, and in the 1920s was drafted for use in mathematics. ISO has defined information as "the meaning that is currently assigned to data by means of the conventions applied to that data", which doesn't seem to relate to the 'I' in IT. 

Technology comes from a Greek word meaning "a systematic treatment (of grammar etc.)" [OED] and is an extension of the Greek word for art or craft. Technology is not synonymous with scientific discipline.

Convergences and Divergences

Convergence, thank goodness, has dropped out of the media vocabulary where, for a while, it was a kind of magic pudding. There is nothing remarkable about convergence of technologies; ever since people learned to sharpen and harden the point of a stick using fire there has been a continuum of technology convergence. The wires that carried Morse code were later adapted to telephony, fax, and teletype; they have been carrying binary data since Baudot code was invented about 1880. 

Having been suitably amazed by the magic of convergence, we may now be seeing a divergence. There is a dichotomy that separates the management of hardware, networks, operating systems, and applications from the management of knowledge. 

Knowledge is not a synonym for information. As already mentioned information can be - and often is - wrong; on the other hand knowledge has a connotation of truth. The word is defined by OED as, In the general sense: the fact or condition of having information acquired by study or research; acquaintance with ascertained truths, facts, or principles; information acquired by study; learning; erudition.

Knowledge can encompass transactions, the state of an organisation's financial position, general business records, statistics, results of research, and any of those things one might find in a real library. An enterprise's knowledge base is a vital resource and an important asset, the management of which requires its own skills. They differ from those necessary to the management of machines, systems, and software. Knowledge management involves the control of acquisition, verification, storage, processing, retrieval, presentation, interpretation, and creation of human-readable information. 

A good example of the difference is the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and - more recently - XML. SGML dates back some thirty years; its architects wrote no programs and were not concerned about hardware or operating systems. They laid down a specification with which software engineers should comply. Since then SGML applications have been running on hardware that was not even a glint in an engineer's eye in 1970. SGML documents are processed by applications written by programmers who weren't born when the documents were created. 

In writing of XML's capacity to enable "communities of users to create [markup] languages that best capture their unique data and ideas" Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy comment that, "even if no browser exists that can accurately render these new tags in a displayable form, the ability to capture and standardize information is tremendously important for future extraction and interpretation of these ideas" [HTML & XHTML - The Definitive Guide]. 

An excellent presentation of how the management of knowledge can work is contained in Kevin DIck's lucid text, XML - A Manager's Guide. The book, regardless of its subject, is an structured information. 
It is not a large book, requires no special technical knowledge, and uses a style that makes for easy reading. Anyone who may be faced with the task of preparing and delivering a presentation on why XML, and how it can be deployed, will find this a valuable resource. The content is divided into three parts: XML concepts and what it can do; logistics of deploying XML, from tools to human resources; and a discussion of XML applications. 

Kevin Dick: XML - A Manager's Guide ISBN 0-201-433354-4 Published by Addison-Wesley,  185 pp., RRP $49.25 inc. GST

The next time you see or hear 'IT' mentioned, ask yourself: do they know what they are talking about?

Reprinted from the November 2000 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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